2022 Youri Soroka "Local Wood Challenge" SP/WN

This 2022 Youri Soroka "Local Wood Challenge" is a classical guitar with a French Jura spruce top and French walnut back and sides, handmade in the Auvergne, France, entirely from European woods – many of them local and reclaimed.

Youri Soroka's "Local Wood Challenge"

This instrument is one of Youri's "Local Wood Challenge" guitars, which prioritize the use of local materials rather than exotic woods from far away. For the back and sides, Youri used a mix of cherry and walnut, and spruce for the soundboard. The fingerboard is quite unique because it's made of 5,000-year-old bog oak that was kindly provided to Youri by a friend from Wales. This is a very lightly built instrument with a low body resonance that has great clarity and sustain. As with all of Youri's guitars, the sound is very malleable and ultra responsive to subtle color changes, giving a player a very expressive sound palette to work from.

The Story Behind the Wood

For the back-story on the materials, Youri shared with us how he acquired the materials used for this instrument:

"Several years ago my father-in-law asked me to help him with picking up a workbench he found in a classified ad. We came to the meeting place, and found out that it was a big woodworking shop that looked abandoned. It belonged to the son of the late owner, who was selling off all the woodworking machines in order to sell the building afterwards. Previously, it was a pattern-maker shop, where they used to build wooden molds for different industries, and at some point in the 80's they were also building furniture. While walking around all of the bandsaws, lathes, sanders and planers I found a big pile of wood. I asked the son of the owner if it was for sale, and he said that he wasn't thinking about selling it. He was going to chop it all to pieces and use it as firewood. I told him that I was interested in buying it, so he called me on the following day with a price and we shook hands. It was about 4m3 of wood, many decades old. I found a lot of alder and walnut, as pattern makers use it to build molds, and also cherry, chestnut, ash, black walnut, and oak. When I told the seller that I was interested in using this local wood to build musical instruments, he loved the idea, and he said his father would have been happy to know that his wood was used for such a purpose."

French Walnut, Cherry and Jura Spruce

Youri has selected a piece of French walnut for the back and sides, bridge, and the head plate. This walnut grew locally near the area where he lives – the area of Gerzat, not far from the famous volcano "Puy de Dôme" in the Auvergne region. The wood has been air-dried for at least 3 decades. He also used cherry in the middle of the back to add some longitudinal strength for a brighter sound. Youri told us that in general European walnut is very strong transversally and pretty flexible lengthwise. Cherry, on the other hand, is bright sounding and strong lengthwise. He combined French walnut and cherry to obtain the sound he had in mind. He also used cherry for the binding. Interestingly, this cherry came from the same stock as the one he used for the guitar presented at the 2nd Antonio Marín Montero Guitar Building Competition in Granada.

The soundboard is made of a piece of spruce that comes from the French Jura region. All internal bracing and reinforcements were also made of spruce. For the neck, Youri used a classy piece of old alder. Buffalo horn was used for the tie block inlay to complement the beautiful tuners with galalith rollers and buttons.

Although a "second-hand" guitar, this is in brand-new condition, exactly as it was when we first saw it in 2022.

Photos taken during construction

Youri Soroka: French-Ukrainian Guitar Maker

We met French-Ukrainian guitar builder Youri Soroka at the 2nd International "Antonio Marín Montero" Guitar Building Competition in Granada, Spain in 2018 and were immediately impressed with both the person and his work, and indeed ordered our first guitar from him at that time. Youri's backstory is almost as beautiful as the look and sound of his instruments. Here he describes how he went from a career in technology to falling in love with the craft of guitar building:

From Software Developer to Luthier

"I was a computer software developer and came to guitar making by accident. Initially, I just wanted to repair my old classical guitar, which led me to retable it. Impressed by the resulting sound and having then bought a few tools, I wanted to build one entirely from scratch. I completed my first guitar in less than a month working at night in my garage. Then the second, then third… I was starting to fall in love with the process. At some point, I realized that this was really something I wanted to do for a living, as this was the first time in my life – when at work – I was saddened by the fact that it was 6 p.m. and time to go home.

Hide Glue, Shellac and Local Woods

I always admired traditional and historical woodworking, and starting from my third build, I tried using hide glue and traditional methods for overall construction. Since then, I've stuck with these methods. Another thing important to me is building guitars in a planet-friendly way, with the least waste generated possible and no chemicals used – no gluing bindings with scotch, etc. The main ingredients are wood, hide glue and shellac. This also led to my interest in using local woods."

Prize Winner in Granada

Youri returned to Granada in 2019, where he took second prize in the classical guitar category of the 3rd Antonio Marín Montero Guitar Making Competition.